Top Ten Tuesday: Autumnal Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Today’s theme is autumnal covers. 

Autumn in all its colours. Orange and red and black and purple and blue. Not so obvious, the last three, until you think of crisp skies and crows feathers. Autumn is my favourite season, but it also my favourite publishing season. Summer relationships and sparkling seas? Over like a dropped ice-cream cone. It’s all about bonfires and sorcery and long dark nights indoors with a book. 

Here are some of my favourite autumnal covers of 2017. Regular readers have heard about some of the books so many times, that instead of a round-up as such, I will focus only on the covers. 

Images go top to bottom for each row. The Invincibles And The Beasts Of Bramble Wood by Caryl Hart. Illustrated by Sarah Warburton: autumn begins with blackberry picking, so I was sold on this one from the title. I love how the traditional Halloween black-and-orange is broken with splashes of bright green. It looks spooky in a really cosy way, just scary enough for a middle-grade audience. 

 

Hide And Seek by Anthony Browne: This is the most sophisticated, beautiful autumn you have seen, and the most beautifully observed. This book shows how quickly a child in the woods goes between joy at a game, and fear at being ‘alone’ in such a large outdoor space. At the strange noises, and things which look like they might be other than they are. Read my review here. 

 

Vlad The World’s Worst Vampire by Anna Wilson Another spooky-but-safe middle-grade read. Vlad’s cartoon style face is ridiculously cute, while the spindly trees hint and bats hint at some spooks and scares.

 

Curse Of The Werewolf Boy by Chris Priestly More Halloween, more orange. Literally more orange. This must be the most orange cover I have ever seen, but look how spooky those ghoulish faces are against it’s backdrop. 

 

The Wizards Of Once by Cressida Cowell. Exactly how beautiful is this, with its purple cover and the lettering like it was burnt in by a sparkler or a wand? The crow in the centre is intriguing. I know wizards and warriors feature in this story, but crows? What is the connection? 

 

A Pocketful of Crows by Joanne M Harris I love the gold border. It reminds me of a historical tapestry. The crows here look as if they are coming in to attack. 

 

Nevermoor: The Trials Of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend And did I mention, it is divine? I can’t stop raving about this book. Morrigan looks like Madeline in negative. It is almost, but not quite, cartoonish, and I love the burst of light around the lettering, as Morrigan has burst out of nowhere. Read my review here. 

 

The Rise Of Wolves by Kerr Thompson A touch autumnal, a touch wintery, I love the detail. The smoking chimney pot suggests a cosy retreat, while the gathering wolves hint at something deeper going on. 

 

Witch Born by Nicholas Bowling How divine is this cover? It hints at hedge magic, gypsy magic, with the dried flowers and the detail of the crow’s earring. I love the palette. It manages to be a bold colour with a subtle palete, and I think that is quite special. 

 

Leaf by Sandra Dieckmann This manages to be autumnal with very few splashes of orange, and I think it is a truer representation of the outdoors as we see it. For all the leaves that turn, there are plenty of evergreens and wheat, not to mention the fact the leaves don’t turn at once like someone turned on the Technicolour. Love the texture and brush-stokes, something which adds to the realistic effect.

 

Do you have any favourite covers this autumn? Any all time favourites? Let me know in the comments below.

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